


Desert Bloom

by canis_m



Category: Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-05-01
Updated: 2009-05-01
Packaged: 2017-11-28 01:45:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,430
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/668854
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/canis_m/pseuds/canis_m
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The training centered on the problem of attachment.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Desert Bloom

**Author's Note:**

> _Sometimes we invoke others to liberate ourselves, in the hope that someone might wait for us at the end of an uncertain path, that their familiar, trustworthy voice might encourage us, urge us on._ \- Predrag Matvejevic
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The training centered on the problem of attachment, Qui-Gon told him.

A living being's deepest attachment was to the body. Focus determined reality; form dictated perception. All living beings clung to the life of the body because they could conceive of no alternative, knew no other way of existing in the world. To remain in the body, to maintain the consciousness circumscribed by it was the ultimate physical desire. All other cravings of the flesh--for sustenance, shelter, comfort, sex--were mere shadows of this. 

Obi-Wan sat on the rug in meditation pose, hands resting without tension on his knees. He opened his eyes, though there was no one to see, no visible sign of Qui-Gon in the central room of the hut. Light streamed through the narrow windows. He judged by the angle that it was well past noon.

"But Master," he said aloud, "to preserve individual consciouness...isn't that exactly what you've done?"

 _It seems a paradox, doesn't it._ Qui-Gon's voice rang as it always had, around him and within him, like the Force itself.

"'Seems' being the operative word, I suppose."

_I shared your puzzlement once. In my fleshly days._

Obi-Wan opened his mouth to scold, as he would've scolded a child harassing hapless lifeforms in a xenological garden. "You shouldn't tease the living, Master. Aren't luminous beings meant to be above that sort of--"

Just then his stomach gurgled. The noise seemed thunderous in the confines of the room. For an instant he was sixteen again, at the mercy of growth spurts and unrelenting schedules and Qui-Gon's indulgence. Here there were no tacitly delivered extra ration bars. He had lost weight since returning to Tatooine, had eaten nothing since a handful of dried fruit at first sunrise. The prospect of freedom from physicality wobbled in his mind like a mirage.

 _Perhaps we should continue later,_ suggested Qui-Gon. Good-humored. Disembodied.

Obi-Wan drew his dignity about him and got to his feet. 

*

They had settled into a routine of sorts. It was strange but soothing to be part of a _they_ again, part of this particular they, like wrapping up in an old robe and discovering that it still fit comfortably, despite the fraying of intervening years. Obi-Wan found himself lapsing into the role of irreverent but pliant student readily, as if he'd never been ousted from it. He felt no dissonance, no shame in the regression. Whatever he might have been in relation to others, at whatever age, he was his master's apprentice. However self-reliant he might have become, however bearded and decorated, it was right and proper that he receive guidance from this man. This spirit. Force-forsaken poltergeist. Whatever Qui-Gon was these days.

He'd asked what it was like, of course. Being dead. Qui-Gon had answered only that it was impossible to describe in terms that would make sense to the non-dead, and there was no use in getting ahead of himself. 

When weather permitted, Obi-Wan rose before dawn and left the hut, descending the canyon to perform katas there, out of easy sight, in the half-light between first and second sunrise. In his old life he would have meditated first, but on Tatooine there was time enough for stillness during the heat of midday. The katas consoled him in their constancy. After all that had happened, they still had the power to clear his mind. He practiced them unarmed, beginning with Shii-Cho and shifting without pause to Soresu. 

He had no living audience but the eopie, who would follow him down the canyon trail, hoping to be fed. It stood witness to his exercises with a dim amazement verging on disapproval, snorting now and then through its proboscis. His other observer was less vocal, if more appreciative.

 _The third form suits you,_ said Qui-Gon one morning. _I should've known it would. I'm not sure anything else would have served against Grievous._

Astonishment slipped through Obi-Wan. He held the emotion as if it were a still pose, then moved smoothly through it. When the kata was finished he stood his ground with feet planted in the final stance, letting the rush of his pulse abate. 

"You were there?" he asked.

 _I told you, Padawan. I've always been here._

His throat closed. He spoke slowly. "When you say 'always'--" 

_I mean it. And I greatly admire your Soresu. If I were in any state to practice with you, I'd ask for a refresher course._ A pause followed, less rueful than wistful. _But I do miss watching you fly._

Obi-Wan was still for another moment. Then he straightened and rolled his shoulders back. 

Fourth form, opening stance. Two-handed guard. Half speed. His limbs supplied the next move, the next and the next, in a sequence ingrained past all chance of forgetting. Each step summoned its successor, no different from beads on a prayer bracelet or syllables in a chant. He felt--as he had since the day he'd stood in a salle, fourteen and quivering at the promise of _today we begin with Ataru,_ letting those all-knowing hands position him--that the fourth form belonged to his master. Never mind the thousands upon thousands of other Jedi who had practiced it in the history of the Order, including Master Yoda: the fourth form was Qui-Gon's, and Qui-Gon had given it to him, and he'd loved it for that. Had excelled in it, despite the difficulty of the Force-assisted acrobatics. Not just excelled, but reveled.

When he'd given it up, after Naboo, it wasn't only because he'd seen the danger in it, the flaw. 

Now perhaps this joy, too, could return to him. He increased his pace to full speed. When he reached the series of rotations, the Force rushed to him as if with pent-up vehemence, propelling him though _ton su ma_ somersaults in midair. Gravity vanished. The canyon wall tilted and loomed. He spun and touched stone and re-launched from it, like a swimmer kicking off from the side of a pool. In his final leap he flashed past the eopie, near enough to stretch out with one hand and graze the hairs on its flank. The eopie squalled and bolted, glaring sideways at him in reproach.

He landed in a crouch with passable grace, and held it for several heartbeats before flopping backward on the sand. Awareness of heat descended on him, dizzying. He was panting. His tunic clung to his shoulders and lower back. 

_You see. You've missed it too._

It was difficult to argue while the endorphins still buoyed him. He lacked the spare breath to huff. He kicked his legs outward, bending over them in a long stretch.

"I'm supposed to be--letting go--of my attachment to the body. Not increasing it." He hadn't allowed himself to sweat so thoroughly in months. Reckless, in the desert, to lose so much water through the skin. It felt wonderful. He raked damp hair back from his forehead and jabbed a finger in the general direction of the air. "You're supposed to be helping." 

The air was unabashed. _In good time. You cannot relinquish fully unless you fully understand what you relinquish._

Obi-Wan grimaced. 

_What?_

"The pompous aphorism competition, Master." His grimace shifted to a grin. "I've just lost it."

*

That was how his days passed: morning chores and katas, meditation and indoor work in the afternoon. When he went into the desert he did it in the relative cool of evening. From time to time he had to travel to Anchorhead or Mos Eisley for supplies. He alternated between the two, careful to appear in either no more than once per month. 

The market in Anchorhead was held after first sunset, in a grimy building that had once been a garage. Moisture farmers sold water and produce, odds and ends. Sometimes an enterprising Jawa clan would appear to hawk their scavenged wares: scrap metal, defunct mechanicals, abandoned or stolen droids. 

It was a ragged affair, and the nearest thing that passed for social congress in the life of a recluse. Obi-Wan took the opportunity to cultivate his reputation.

"What do you think of these?" he asked the air, hefting a mesh bag full of globe allium. 

Qui-Gon (as expected) said nothing. The young woman running the vegetable stand busied herself with receipts, though her hands fumbled slightly, and her smile was politely fixed. The Force broadcast her nervousness like a siren's wail. Obi-Wan inspected the allium with grave attention.

"Well, _I_ think they'll do very well." He turned his back to the air as if to snub it and leaned toward the young woman, who simultaneously leaned away. "You'll have to pardon my familiar."

"F-familiar?" 

"Familiar spirit." Obi-Wan beamed in the face of her discomfiture, even as he felt sorry for provoking it. She reminded him a little of Beru. "I can't blame you if you're not 'familiar' with the term. Not all wizards have them."

"Of course," she said faintly.

"Sometimes I think mine's more trouble than he's worth. How much for the allium?"

The young woman took his money hastily, and slumped with relief when he strolled away.

During the long ride back across the desert, Obi-Wan relaxed into the eopie's lope with practiced ease. He guided its course with gentle flicks of Force, more efficient and effective than tugs on the reins. Except for the eopie's footfalls and the creaking of its saddlepacks, silence extended across the dunes. He let it stretch into the darkness for a good hour before he spoke.

"Surely you're not sulking."

Qui-Gon was so slow to answer that Obi-Wan began to wonder whether he really had been sulking, and no mistake.

_I was meditating._

"Meditating? Do the dead need to meditate?"

 _On impertinence._ The night wind suddenly blustered, like a peevish old man. Obi-Wan was on the verge of laughter--and how strange that would be, to laugh, to know himself capable of laughter even now--when Qui-Gon added, _You've changed course._

Trust his master to notice sooner rather than later. Obi-Wan nudged the eopie to a faster pace. 

_Obi-Wan. There's nothing in the Force to suggest any threat to Luke._

"Not at the moment, no." Obi-Wan refrained from mentioning that Qui-Gon's record of sensing Sith-related threats in a timely manner was less than perfect. No doubt prescience--as well as hindsight--improved with death. 

_It's a very long ride to the Lars farm._

"One which my gluteal muscles will experience, not yours, since you have none."

 _It's your gluteal muscles I'm thinking of,_ Qui-Gon said.

Had he been any less a trained expert at controlling involuntary physical response, Obi-Wan might have reddened. With indignation, he told himself. Not delight.

"Still the backseat pilot," he said drily, and Qui-Gon was quiet after that.

*

The next day his meditations were distracted. It was nothing to do with the Lars farm, where all had been peaceful the night before. 

_Perhaps a koan would be instructive,_ mused Qui-Gon.

Perhaps not at the dinner hour, mused Obi-Wan. He checked the legumes soaking on the stove. It was time to chop the allium. Aloud he said, "I am fond of a good koan. I've been tempted to compose one myself." 

_Oh?_

"In fact, I may have tried my hand at one already."

_And will you share it?_

He cleared his throat. "'What is the sound of a Jedi Master's ghost raising one eyebrow?'"

There was a pause. 

_A good effort,_ said Qui-Gon at last. _But if I'm forbidden to tease the living, you should stop mocking the deceased._

"I move that we re-negotiate those terms, Master. Things will get very dull here very quickly otherwise."

_Very well. Open mockery, then, and no koans. We'll try another tack. Do you love me, Obi-Wan?_

The knife nearly slipped. He was taken aback, and might have shown it for an instant before his lips pressed flat. The tone of the question seemed to teeter on the academic, if not the rhetorical. If he chopped the remaining allium with more vigor than was necessary, no one remarked on the excess. 

"You know the answer."

_Do I? Even now?_

Obi-Wan minced. Serenely. He prided himself on the uniform width of his cuts.

 _Very well._ Fond amusement, and a trace of some nuance he couldn't name. _Is that love an attachment?_

Obi-Wan scraped the minced allium into the pot, cleaned the knife blade, wiped his hands. 

"In case you've forgotten," he said, "you were dead. I grieved you once already. I spent years learning to accept your absence." 

He hoped the words were measured, unaccusing. He meant them to be so. There was enough grace left in him, enough respect for teacher and method, enough habit of willing compliance to make him pause, reconsider the question and his answer, assess and reassess. He let his hands come to rest on the cutting board, drew an unhurried breath.

"And I did--I did accept it. I had no expectation of your return, Master, not until Master Yoda spoke of it. It's given me more comfort than I can say. I accept that, as well. I would be dreadfully alone here, if it weren't for you."

_You never were an eremite by temperament._

Obi-Wan himself was unsure. For most of his life he'd been part of a binary system, had gone straight from Qui-Gon's tutelage to Anakin's with no interval spent alone. It was true that the years he recalled as his happiest had passed in someone else's orbit. Somehow he'd always been the one doing the revolving, not the one revolved around. Even in Anakin's case.

It was still difficult to think of Anakin. His mind shied from any memory Anakin touched, like an animal skirting deep and pervasive traps. He would need to attend to that, sooner or later. For now there was a more immediate ghost to address.

"I have no hold over you, no control of your comings and goings--" He broke off as he recalled what Qui-Gon had said before, about being here. Always. He exhaled. "You speak to me when it suits you. I can neither see nor touch you--"

_Would you prefer to?_

"Even if I would, I am powerless to bring it about."

_Does that powerlessness frustrate you?_

Obi-Wan gathered the allium tops and pitched them one by one into the compost unit. The sound of each small impact was expressive. 

"If I could see you, I would at least know where to aim when you ask too many trying questions."

Laughter in the mind like a movement of wind. It was the same motion that inscribed ripples on sand or an expanse of still water. Incongruous to think of water here, now, on this dessicated world, but his eager sense-memory furnished the sheen and glint of reflecting pools in the sunken gardens of the Temple. Himself mirrored, a younger version, braided and determined, standing in the lee of his master as if there were no dearer or more fortifying place. Bright depths. Clarity. 

A touch on the bare nape of his neck. 

His skin prickled as if the very hairs were astonished. He glanced over his shoulder, wide-eyed at the empty air.

*

After that he began to sense not only voice but presence: nothing so specific or direct as touch, merely a calm emanation in the Force. He wondered whether it was due to some change in himself--he felt no different, certainly no more enlightened--or in Qui-Gon, or in what lay between them. He kept the wondering to himself. It was simpler to accept without expectation if he posed no questions. He examined his feelings, which in the main were gratitude and baffled joy. He acknowledged the emotions and let them be. 

As the weeks drew on he learned that there were seasons in the desert. Windstorms came and raged, scouring the external walls and windows of the hut with barrages of flung sand. The nights plunged into cold. The native creatures went to ground, into their private dens. Obi-Wan followed their example.

One night he woke to darkness and the hiss of sand against the roof. The noise had grown as familiar to him as rainfall, or the eternal traffic of Coruscant; something else must have roused him. He lay in bed, bundled under layers of pelt blankets and his outspread robe, with only his face exposed to air. Cold stung the bare skin of his cheeks. He shifted and winced. Why was it so damned--

_The space heater malfunctioned. No, don't get up. You lack the part to repair it._

Qui-Gon's voice. It sounded close, closer than ever, like a murmur against his ear, which was absurd since he heard it not with his ears but with his mind. Obi-Wan murmured in response, groping for the Force as if for an extra blanket. He encountered something warm within it, or something that gave the impression of warmth, something his nerves interpreted as warmth because they knew no better. Blue light flickered behind his eyelids. When he opened his eyes, there was only the dark.

He blinked, shedding the dim contentment of sleep. The presence in the Force swathed him, reminding him of long arms and long legs, a tall body that seemed to go on forever when it was horizontal. For a moment he felt entirely dumb.

"Are you in my bed?" he asked.

 _I am._ The tone was placid. _Metaphysically._

He was dreaming, then. Hallucinating. When the heater malfunctioned it had leaked some noxious gas that was confounding his brain and his perception, disabling the internal censors. Either that, or the stress of losing everything and everyone he'd ever cared about had finally caught up to him, and he was in the throes of a well-earned breakdown. He licked his dry lips.

"What...what prompted this?"

_I listened to the moment._

A rote retort from years ago sprang to mind, one he'd thought a hundred times as an adolescent but never uttered aloud. He burrowed his face into the pillow. "If the moment told you to jump off a cliff--"

_What was that?_

"Nothing, Master." He un-burrowed. "Not to look a gift bantha in the mouth, but...did the moment never suggest this course when you were more corporeal?"

_If it did, alas, I was deaf to it._

The regret sounded genuine. As fantasies went, this one was a little too realist in sensibility. Obi-Wan dragged the blankets up to cover his nose. " _I_ heard it. Perfectly well."

Laughter around him, less a ripple than a rumble. _I'm sure you did._

His face began to feel heated, almost feverish. He narrowed his eyes. A half-forgotten wound flared, and he traced its seam unthinkingly. "Is that why you were so eager to give me up? Because you knew that I was--"

_Obi-Wan._

"I suppose I can't blame you." It was petty, perhaps, to have this conversation now, but there was nothing in the Code against pettiness. Even if there had been, the Order that had followed the Code was gone.

_Padawan, you know why I acted as I did then. If I'd thought your fondness for my company a problem, I'd have found another way to address it._

Obi-Wan stared into the dark. "It might have become a problem." _If you hadn't died_ went without saying. "I was jealous of my place with you. I didn't want to lose that, not even when your behavior was..."

_Insufferable?_

He let out a puff of breath. "If the boot fits."

_You were patient even in your impatience. Any other upstanding apprentice of twenty-some would've been squirming to escape his half-rogue master's tyranny, not striving so beautifully to accommodate. Adi Gallia, may she rest in the Force, used to tease me about your devotion. "Your loyal Padawan," she always said._

He felt himself flush. "I wasn't...we had our disagreements."

_To be sure. When you argued with me, it was like a flower disagreeing with the sun._

He should've been offended, maybe, or stricken, or should've scoffed at Qui-Gon's egoism. Instead he felt only a little hollow, as if the breath had been walloped out of him in the salle. Laughter hitched faintly in his throat. 

"And now? Am I still floral?"

_More weedlike, these days. Tenacious, a bit prickly._

Obi-Wan lifted his chin and thumbed his beard. 

_Like one of those desert succulents._ Qui-Gon was warming to the analogy. _Short, persistent. Natty little thorns. Survives on next to nothing, blooms once a decade or so--_

"Once a decade?" echoed Obi-Wan. "I must be overdue."

And he could almost feel himself unfolding. He stretched his arms as far as they could reach without protruding from the blankets, until his hands touched the curvature of the wall. It occurred to him that he might like to lie under the covers and listen to Qui-Gon compare him to cacti for the rest of the foreseeable future. Instead of laughing at the prospect he closed his eyes and curled his toes.

Sharing a bed in the metaphysical sense did have advantages. In the physical sense Qui-Gon would never have fit. The alcove was too small, too semicircular, and Qui-Gon too extensive, with the way he sprawled like a rangy lion across a favorite rock, hair unbound over his slanted shoulders, eyelids drooping with the deep complacency of ease, and all around him that uncanny halo, flickering, beckoning, pale blue--

Obi-Wan lurched upright.

"Master--" 

He blinked hard, but the image was gone. Gone. Cut off like an aborted hologram transmission. His voice was thick. 

"I saw you. I--"

_Shh, yes. Yes, you did. Not with your eyes._

He shut them and tried to see again, again, another glimpse, but there was no try. He saw nothing. The blankets had slumped to his waist. The cold was shocking on the bare skin at his wrists, the hollow of his throat.

_I'm still here, Obi-Wan._

He nodded. It was in him, then--the failure, the inability. His own, not his master's. He rubbed his useless eyes. At length he sank backward and rolled to one side, huddling, dragging the blankets to his chin. Even the brief exposure to air had left him chilled. 

When he reached for the Force to warm himself, it swept around him with unexpected thoroughness, wrapping him emphatically, like a long-deferred embrace.

*

By morning the storm had passed. The hut stood awash in drifts of accumulated sand. Obi-Wan had to clear them from in front of the door by Force before he could push it open. When he stepped outside, hooded against the cold, the eopie was waiting to greet him, clouding the air with puffs of steamy breath. It bleated and huffed and otherwise made plain how pathetic the shelter he'd built for it had been, how it had weathered the storm only by dint of sheer determination and the membranes in its nostrils that filtered tiny grains of grit. 

Obi-Wan held out a handful of legume sprouts. The eopie gobbled them forgivingly.

"Careful, now." He patted its neck. "You'll make yourself sick, and we've a trip to Anchorhead ahead of us."

He circled the hut, checking for damage to the windows and walls. The winds had been strong enough to fling not just sand but sizeable pebbles. One of them caught his eye when it glittered at his feet. As he bent to pick it up he realized it was not a pebble but a beetle, one of the cold-resistant species, small and unassuming in its brown carapace. It sat in the center of his palm, unmoving. Only his Force-sense assured him it was still alive. 

The sudden tenderness he felt toward its presence surpised him. He curled his fingers around it, lightly enclosing. He held it for a moment, then opened his hand. Another moment passed before the beetle stirred and began to trundle across his palm. 

"Master," he said, "I've just remembered something."

No words in reponse, only a sense of awareness, of listening.

"Something Master Bondara used to say, when he was drilling the initiates. 'You must learn to hold the lightsaber by loosening your grip.'" 

_Master Bondara did have his moments,_ Qui-Gon agreed.

"But loosening one's grip doesn't mean dropping the saber altogether."

_No, dropping is generally unhelpful._

He had to smile at that, though the smile was crooked and brief. The beetle had paused at the edge of his palm, near the callus below his little finger. It raised its wings and launched itself into the air. Obi-Wan watched it navigate drunkenly to a vertical landing on the side of the hut.

"So both gripping too hard and dropping are to be avoided." He tucked his hands into the sleeves of his robe. "I understand the principle in relation to lightsabers, living beings, relationships--" he hesitated. "Possibly love--"

_As a matter of fact, I think you are a master of that form._

He wanted to take pleasure in the praise, but it roused too much sorrow in him, too much grief and guilt. If he was truly a master, why hadn't he taught Anakin better? Why had Anakin succumbed to fear and crushed what he cherished in that suffocating grip? But Obi-Wan knew that to master a form and to teach it were two different things. To teach and to learn were again different. He had promised to stop holding himself accountable for choices that were not his own. 

He resumed his circuit around the hut and moved on to the vaporator behind it. Vaporators were sturdy devices, built to withstand storms, but as yet he had only one of them. He bent to the control panel and began a series of diagnostic checks.

"If I've learned not to cling to those I love," he said, "it's because I always lose them." The dry chill in the air had begun to burn his eyes. "You're the only one who's come back." 

The vaporator whirred as it performed the checks. Obi-Wan unbent and returned his hands to the cover of his sleeves. From the mountainous horizon the second sun had just begun to emerge. The doubling brightness of the morning made him narrow his eyes and adjust his cowl. 

"In any case, the principle--I believe I have some grasp of that. But applying it to my person is another matter."

 _Give it time,_ Qui-Gon said.

Obi-Wan nodded. A weight came to rest on his shoulders, or something like a weight, like the warm splay of steadying palms. He glanced over his shoulder without surprise this time, as if Qui-Gon were really standing there--in the flesh, incongruous, a step behind and to the left.


End file.
